Persecutory – Towards The Ultimate Extinction (2017)

Hailing from Turkey, where the situation is a bit grim (and that’s not a pun, look up the execution videos from the country’s military coup if you can find them – I still can’t get over those) we have a black/thrash act that sounds very much as you’d expect for the genre, with drums that pummel as loud as the bass and a raspy frontman that feels right at home with the style. Sometimes that goes into a tremolo backed section of atmosphere and shouts of protest or adoration (I’m not sure which) which you’ll hear prominently on the nearly twelve-minute title track. Additionally, said title cut is placed as the second track on the disc, so you won’t have to wait until the end of it to hear the band in full-force. Sometimes the bass can drown out the tremolo riffs and even the vocals, but that gives a very organic quality that doesn’t feel overproduced and matches what you might get with a Persecutory stage show. There are clear thrash riffs on “Till Relentless Salvation Comes” which balance nicely with the loud shouts and blasts that also find themselves a part of this conglomeration.

Though the record is quite brutal and filled with the rage of ten thousand black and unholy Suns, as a whole, it doesn’t really do much more than what you see here. Maybe that isn’t a problem for you, but I’ve heard so many similar approaches that I can’t really see the sense in having three cuts towards the end that nearly mimic each other aside from some slight variations here and there. If you’re in need of letting off some steam though, this disc of Turkish rage and hatred might be just what you’re looking for. Simply put, Persecutory make black/thrash and it sounds like the kind of black thrash that carries this approach right into it’s most extreme and unwelcoming formats. The disc is so engorged with black metal mentality that it’s thrash senses are nearly buried within all of the blasts and tremolos.

That being said, it matches the kind of anger you might expect from a country where I’ve seen a great deal of oppression. It’s the sound of being generally pissed off, and you can’t really mimic that. It’s one of the reasons that this kind of metal exists to begin with, even if some of the subject matter might be a little bit corny in all of it’s satanic leanings. But that’s also kind of black metal, right?